Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In the last meeting of my Wednesday Robotics Lab, in their last experiment under my tutelage, we had programs using the programmable integrated circuit with multiple inputs and outputs.

In the previous class, they only had to make the actual circuit of the three-bit binary converter to decimal, which they finished.

Since I could not give the same circuit task to the second class, their implementation was now a two-bit times two-bit multiplication.

From this the maximum product would be three times three, which means they have to light up a maximum of nine light emitting diodes.

They had two ways of being able to implement this in the software.

The first was by brute force, where checking each of the four inputs is checked before lighting up the proper number of diodes.

Since there are sixteen possible combinations of outputs (actually nine because seven of the operations will result in zero LEDs lit up) they have to have that many conditional statements.

The other, supposedly simpler alternative is to convert the two bit input into decimal first, get the product, then use that as a counter in a loop to light up that many diodes on the board.

This was also the class (not the first one) where we were able to figure out the resistor values and connections needed so that when the switch is broken or in the open position, the input to the chip would be considered logic low, and when the switch is closed, the input becomes logic high.

There where two voltage dividers that were used for this one and three resistors.

One resistor is connected to the ground with a medium valued resistance.

At the connecting node, there are two branches going to the five volt source, one of which is continuous and has the low resistance.

The second five volt branch has the switch and also the highest resistance of all the proportional values for the circuit fragment.

Session 1859 has mixed emotions about changing teachers. Class dismissed.